Linguistic approaches to everyday narrative
Module: Additional lectures
Taught by dr Piotr Wyroślak
The study of narrative has enjoyed a sustained interest – and the fundamental importance of telling stories for human experience has been recognised across multiple disciplines in humanities and social sciences. The present course invites participants to look at narrative in the context of linguistic practices through which it emerges. Of particular interest will be narratives in joint communicative efforts – in spoken and written language, in digital and non-digital multimodal settings. Everyday in the course title refers both to narratives on everyday life and narratives that are embedded in everyday linguistic practices.
Among the overarching questions of the course, we will consider:
• What is (not) narrative?
• How do we structure our stories? Do we all tell stories according to the same, underlying structural principles?
• How do stories emerge in complex interactions as a joint communicative effort?
• How metaphor and metonymy shape our narratives?
• How do we present our experience as ordinary, quotidian and acceptable?
Each topic will be associated with a companion text and a dedicated mini-assignment for own exploration (e.g. preparing a short note on students’ own examples of phenomena discussed in the companion text). To obtain credits for the course, students will need to complete three or more mini-assignments, and submit a written summary report of their work throughout the semester.
Selected reading:
De Fina, Anna & Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2011. Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139051255.
De Fina, Anna & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.). 2015. The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118458204.
De Fina, Anna & Sabina Perrino (eds.). 2019. Storytelling in the digital world (Benjamins Current Topics). Vol. 104. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.104.
Fludernik, Monika. 2009. An Introduction to Narratology. London/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203882887.
Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 2019. When being quotidian meets being ordinary. In Anita Fetzer & Elda Weizman (eds.), Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, vol. 307, 269–293. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.307.11mat.
Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press.
Sacks, Harvey. 1985. On doing “being ordinary.” In J. Maxwell Atkinson (ed.), Structures of Social Action, 413–429. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511665868.024.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1994. Making a list. Discourse Processes 17(3). 377–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539409544875.
Sinkeviciute, Valeria. 2024. Multimodal joint fantasising as a category‑implicative and category‑relations‑implicative action in online multi‑party interaction. Internet Pragmatics 7(1). 101–136. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00110.sin.